INTERVIEW: Back on the road with British India

17 September 2015

After the release of their fifth studio album and a string out sell-out shows across Australia, British India are headed back to Newcastle for another massive show at The Cambridge Hotel this Saturday 19 September. We had a chat with lead singer, Declan, about their latest album, life on the road, post-show parties, and his favourite stages to play in Australia – including our very own Cambridge…

Hey guys, thanks for chatting with Newcastle Live. You’re set to kick off your Spring Tour this weekend, what’s the thing you most look forward to about getting on the road again?

Just the shows themselves. Playing live is still our lifeblood. When you get a great audience and everything is locking in, it’s incomparable. It’s like white light. You take a breath and look down at the setlist and three songs have gone past in what feels like a nanosecond. And that feeling never goes away, in fact it gets better. At the start of the year we did our biggest tour ever in support of ‘Nothing Touches Me’, and I think the reaction sidelined us a bit, for some shows we were a bit like rabbits in headlights. I still get terribly nervous before the shows, but it’s kind of an addictive fear, and I guess it’s that addiction that’s dragged us out on the road again. It’s playing live when the band really exists, everything else just feels like waiting to play live again.

This tour sees you travelling over a fair bit of Australia, but of course you guys are no strangers to veering off the usual East Coast run and taking on some more regional routes. Do you find there’s any differences between regional and big city shows?

Nope. I’ve always maintained that if I was blindfolded all day and only had my location revealed once I was onstage, I wouldn’t be able to tell you where I was. We attract a certain slice of society wherever we go, and I feel that they’re the same everywhere in the country. The thing that’s different is after the shows. Often in particularly regional places, you can be lucky enough to be taken under some of the locals wings and shown around, house parties, lock-ins that sort of thing, and these are either unexpectedly good or hilariously bad. I remember Matt and I once went to a house party inhabited exclusively by a touring gymnastics team and army guys on leave. A hideous mix, it was like Apocalypse Now. Nights like that usually make up some of the best nights on the road. The things I’ve seen man, it’s a strange world that we live in… Whereas in major cities, you just end up at clubs or having hotel rooms, which is never dull, but not always as memorable.

And, after gigging in so many place across the country, do you have a favourite place? Apart from Newcastle, of course…

Since audiences tend to be mostly the same across the board, it kind of comes down to the incidentals of the environment. Nic really likes Tasmania for some reason, I find it cold and awful. Whereas I, being a relatively sane and normal person, would prefer somewhere like Cairns or Broome, somewhere where it feels like you’re on holiday foremost and playing music secondarily. Actually, North Queensland is a favourite place for us because, aside from being paradise, all the women are both beautiful and complete bogans, which makes for a pretty hilarious combination. You might have been joking about Newcastle, but it’s really true. The Cambridge is and always has been one of our favourite venues in the country. It’s completely unchanged since the first time we went there ten years ago. You’ll be hanging out upstairs waiting to go, and it’s like ‘what fucking year is it’?

You spent a bit of time in Berlin while working on your latest album ‘Nothing Touches Me’ – Tell us a bit about that experience, and what drew you there?

That was about a year ago now, so we can really look back on it and reflect on just how great it was, and how lucky we were to be there. Berlin in the summer is just the best and it’s a very young city, it’s very cliche to say but the streets really buzz, it just feels like things are happening. There was really a feeling that British India were exactly where we wanted to be at that moment. We were excited to work with Simon Berkeleman from Philadelphia Grand Jury because we loved the tracks he’d produced for Art Vs. Science and Red Ink, but it was also the attraction of being uprooted from Melbourne and Australia with all it’s familiarities and routines. We’re always trying to record the album of our careers and you don’t get better by doing the same thing over and over again, so it seemed like a great choice. Plus, there’s the appeal of being in the centre of European history with all the Bowie and Eno mythology, but it is a very different city now. Walking around the leafy suburbs it doesn’t exactly look like a film clip to Weeping Wall so much as Shiny Happy People! Of course, we partied a lot as well and I did mange to fall in love with a Swedish girl named Michelle, so it felt like we’d had the complete experience. Then, of course, we came back and everything we recorded was out of tune so we did it all again in Melbourne. What fun!

When crafting the new album, did you find it was hard to toe the line between keeping the British India “sound” fans have come to love, and feeling the freedom to move in different sonic directions?

We didn’t find it hard at all. We haven’t ever had much regard for ‘the British India sound’, in fact I kind of hate it! Every album since the first one we’ve tried our best to sound like a completely different band, our ethos has always been to make great music without regard for familiar tropes, genre or sound and the resultant albums are just us failing at doing that to varying degrees. It just happens that we’re not very good at anything else apart from sounding vaguely like Nirvana.

And finally, what can Newcastle expect from your live show next weekend?

Just come down expecting a party. It’s not an evening’s entertainment so much as a sweat fest. Just come down and let your hair down, have a drink and dance if you feel like it. We just want people to have a good time, what’s so wrong with that?